My girlfriends love to tease me, I’m the really crafty/nerdy one who’s always knitting, sewing, baking, planting, crafting on my own and organizing shin-digs at my house to encourage them to do the same (like my wreath-making ornament exchange every Christmas). They call me the Martha of our community - and I love it.
The plain and simple fact is that I just can’t get enough of crafty creativity. I admit it, I’m the woman who hangs out at the library stealing craft ideas from the magazines there and then trying to remember exactly how to duplicate them when I get home.
In the same way I love crafts, I hate waste. I’m happy when I use everything - I hate having leftover stuff hanging around my house but it would kill me to throw away something that could be useful some day. That’s why the idea of finding new uses for wallpaper scraps is something that gets me jumping for joy - and my husband’s pretty thrilled, too, because now he won’t have to look at the leftover rolls we still have from the time we remodeled our house……in 1998.
There are so many great ways you can use wallpaper that I never would have thought of before that I just don’t know where to start! Let’s just start simple - nice and easy, so I can lure you in slowly.
You can use wallpaper as book covers. Remember how we used to take brown paper sacks and cut and folded them just so in order to make protective covers for our text books? (I’m not showing my age here, am I?) Well, you can do the same with wallpaper and they make much more attractive and durable covers. Don’t stop at textbooks, though, you can dress up an entire bookshelf if you have a few different wallpaper patterns. Instead of a mishmash of book binders you can cover and arrange your books so that you’ll see more of an art-deco look.
Speaking of art - you can use wallpaper to cover flat picture frames or as the mat for a photo or other framed piece of artwork. With a little more time and effort you can even use scraps of wallpaper to refinish your furniture and give a room a whole new look. You can cover the inside back panel of a bookshelf, entertainment center, or hutch/buffet with wallpaper. You can even apply wallpaper to the outside of a dresser - either on the sides or on a flat front. If you choose to put the wallpaper on your furniture, be sure to use proper adhesive and consider putting a clear finish on top to keep the wallpaper from peeling, ripping, or getting damaged with use.
For smaller scraps of wallpaper, don’t despair - there are smaller craft projects! You can trace the shape of a lamp shade onto the wallpaper, cut it out, and adhere the paper to the plain shade to jazz it up. If you really get into it, you can even make a pleated lamp shade, but that might even be beyond my crafty skills.
There’s really no limit to what you can do - cover a message board, a photo album, a switch or outlet plate - anything you can imagine you can do!